Made in God's Image

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and welcome. It’s good to see you all here. I have a few announcements I’d like to share with you.

The men’s group will meet this evening. The safety meeting you see in your bulletin is actually not this coming week but the week following.

Next Saturday is our work day to prepare the playground and pavilion for our community revival. That will be from 9 to noon. Please come if you can.

Speaking of our community revival, Barr has made a signup sheet if you are interested in helping us during that week. We have opportunities ranging from directing parking to monitoring trash cans to helping with children’s games during our Saturday event to everything in between. We’re also asking for help for putting the tent up (that should be around the week before revival). If you’re willing to help, please sign up for that. This is going to be a big undertaking, and every church participating is going to have to chip in.

And speaking of chipping in, it’s that time of the year when we fill our individual church teams, whether benevolence or grounds, technology or safety, and everything in between. All of these are ministries, and we’re all called to minister. For those of you already serving, we hope you’ll serve again. For anyone not involved, we hope you’ll be willing to change that. In the next few weeks, I’ll be reaching out to many of you, or Joanne, or Molly — and I promise, it might be easy to say no to me or Joanne, but good luck saying no to Molly. The look she’ll give you is one she’s been practicing for 21 years, so fair warning. Please consider and be in prayer about how you can help serve your church. 1 Peter 4:10 says, “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.”

And speaking of prayer. On Friday I was invited to a meeting of a group known as City Elders, which is a local organization made up of pastors, business leaders, and politicians. Our guest speaker was our Commonwealth Attorney, a man named Tim Martin. Tim is a good guy, he is a strong Christian, and he has an incredible story.

During his talk, Tim asked the pastors present to ask their churches to be in prayer for a particular case that will be coming up soon. I’m not going to give you too many details because I’ll just stand up here and bawl like a baby. Tim couldn’t give us much information because of the legalities involved, but the case involves the torture and murder of a three-year-old girl in Augusta County. He said it’s not only the worst case he’s ever prosecuted, it’s the worst case he’s ever heard of. Ever. From anywhere. The FBI has been involved, and even their criminal profilers, who are the best in the world, have said there’s only one word for what happened — evil.

Two people have been charged and arrested. Tim has asked you to pray for him and for his team that their faith might hold firm through this trail. Please pray for this poor girl’s family. Pray for those who will be called as jurors, because I promise you they will never be the same after going through this. Pray that this little girl’s body will be found. Pray for the two people charged, because God’s grace is offered to them. And pray for justice, because evil cannot go unpunished.

I’ll end on a much brighter note. Most of you may know Jameson Shover. Jameson is Petie’s grandson, and he is about to head to Las Vegas to become a missionary, working against human trafficking, working with the homeless, helping people with addiction, and being out on the streets making disciples. The church council has voted to sponsor Jameson on a month by month basis, and we’d like to give you the opportunity to provide for his housing and food as well, so we’ll have that information in next week’s bulletin too. Please be in prayer for Jameson and that God will work through him.

Sue, do you have anything this morning?

Opening Prayer

Father we are so thankful to gather together this morning in your house. We’re thankful for everyone here, and we pray for those who would like to be here but cannot. Lift up those who are sick and hurting. Give them your peace and your healing. We pray your wisdom and presence here this day as we lift up our voices and hearts to praise you, and we ask all of these things in Jesus’s name, Amen.

Sermon

Of all the great blessings God has given us, none rise to the height of your Bible. That Bible is the reason you’re here today. It’s the reason you believe, and I know that’s a strong statement. People might say, “Preacher, I know the Bible’s important, but Jesus is even more important.” And that’s right. But how would you know about Jesus without that book in your hand? How would those who taught you know the words he said or the commands he gave? How would you know who God truly is and what God truly says without the Bible?

As a Christian, the Bible is your standard for living. That book is a map for your travel through this life and the one thing you need to make sense of everything else. Christians talk about the authority of scripture, and what that means is that all the words in your Bible are God’s words, and to disbelieve or disobey any of those words is the same as disbelieving or disobeying God himself.

That’s always an important point to remember. It’s going to be especially important as we go through this sermon. God neither expects nor assumes that his people are going to be perfectly fine with everything that’s written in the Bible. We don’t have to always like it, but we do always have to obey it. There are some passages of scripture that we’re not going to like, some passages that are going to make us uncomfortable. And there are some passages that are just really hard for us to understand, and that’s what I want to talk about for the next two weeks. I want to talk about those parts of the Bible that we read over and over and just go, “Wait, what? What exactly does that mean?” And we’re going to start today by looking at a passage that gets talked about a lot in these times, but for all the wrong reasons.

Turn with me to the very first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1. Genesis 1 is the story of the creation of the universe in general and of our planet in particular, and the stages of creation are divided into what the writer of Genesis (most scholars believe Moses is the writer) call days.

God separates light from darkness and the waters above from the waters below. He brings forth dry land and plants and trees, the sun and moon. He creates the plants and the creatures of the sea, the birds, the animals, and then we come to our selection today, beginning in verse 26 through verse 31:

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.

30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

And this is God’s holy word.

This is a part of scripture that we all know and all grew up being taught — we are made in God’s image. That’s a theme that carries through the entire Bible, but what does it mean? What does it mean to be made in the image and likeness of God? And just as important, how should that shape the way we think about ourselves, others, and our society?

We have all these Christian doctrines — God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit individually, as well as the Trinity. The church, the Bible, man’s sinfulness — we have all these doctrines that we base our religious belief on as they’re laid out in scripture, but what verse 26 of Genesis chapter 1 says is so powerful that I’d argue it’s the most needed bit of doctrine in the church today. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that a lot of the problems we’re having now, whether it’s in our society or our politics or in our own personal lives, can be traced directly to us not understanding what it means to be made in God’s image. So let’s talk about that today.

Now, just about everybody wants to skip right down to verse 27 given where we are today in our disagreements over what’s right and what’s wrong about the way some people live their lives. And we’ll get there, I promise, but we cannot talk about verse 27 until we’ve talked about verse 26, because it’s one of the most powerful and meaningful verses in the entire Bible.

If you look back at the first 25 verses of Genesis chapter 1, you see God as the ultimate maker. You see the ultimate in power and creativity. It’s just a flurry of activity, it’s one thing happening after another. You get a picture of a master painter at his canvas, totally immersed in creating, his brush whipping and mixing the most amazing colors, except in this case, God’s brush is his word. God created everything in the universe, even time itself, with his word.

And by the way, what is God’s word? God’s word is Christ, isn’t it? John 1 — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. . . ”

And so we have at the very beginning of creation God speaking the universe and the earth into existence — “God said,” over and over again, “God said” and “God made” and “God called” and “God created,” until we come to verse 26, and then there’s a pause. God does something special in verse 26 that he hasn’t done while creating everything else. He deliberates. He’s careful. There’s planning. What he’s about to do is going to be done with even more care. God speaks everything else into existence. But God actually makes us. God actually gets his hands into the earth, gets his hands dirty. Our creation is personal.

Let’s look at this verse. First, notice how God begins. “Let us make man,” he says. Now, who is this us? The early Jewish teachers say that God’s speaking to the angels here, to the heavenly host. Others say that God’s actually speaking to the earth. But neither of those can be the case, because God’s saying, “Let us make,” and neither the angels nor the earth can make anything. Only God can do that. So when God says, “Let us make man,” the only person he can be speaking to is himself. He’s speaking to the Trinity. He’s consulting the Son and the Holy Spirit.

God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Nothing like this had been said before. When the stars and the planets were made, when the earth and sun were made and the waters and the land and all the living things in them or upon them, God never says those things are in his image and after his likeness. Those things have characteristics of him. They point to him as their creator. But none of them are in his image, after his likeness. Only this last act of his creation has that. We alone carry the image and likeness of God.

So, what does that mean? What does it mean to have the image of God?

Verse 26 says, “in our image, and after our likeness.” In the Hebrew, those two words mean that we are like God and that we represent God. So the literal translation of verse 26 would be, “Let us make man to be like us and to represent us.”

Now, you could say to that, “Well trust me, I’m nowhere near like God.” But you are in that you have his likeness, and you have God’s likeness in three important ways.

First, you are a moral being. You have an inner sense of right and wrong. Now granted, for some of us that inner sense is pretty weak. There are people whose conscience has been weakened to almost nothing after a lifetime of making bad and selfish choices. But that conscience is still there, because God still created them, and they have the likeness of God.

Second, you are a mental being. You’ve been given a mind that can reason and think logically. Again, some people have a greater capacity for this than others. Your mind is like any other muscle — the more you use it, the stronger it gets. But the fact that you have a mind and you can use your mind to think through things is another way that you are like God.

Lastly, and most importantly, you are like God in that you are eternal, just in a different way. You were created, so you had a beginning. God had no beginning, God always was. But like him, now you will live forever. From your birth on, there will never be a time when you will not exist, which makes your destination after this life the most important choice you will ever make. You’ll either spent forever with God and in complete joy and peace and safety, or you’ll spend forever apart from God in complete despair and violence and danger.

Those are the three ways you’re like God. But what about being in the image of God? What does that mean?

Over in Genesis 5:3, Eve has a child after Abel dies and Cain is banished, and that verse gives us a perfect example of what it means to be made in the image of someone. Genesis 5:3 says, “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.”

Seth wasn’t identical to Adam, just like no child is identical to his or her father. But if you looked at Seth, you knew he was the son of Adam, made in the image of Adam. It’s the same way with us. We share the image of God.

But it’s even more than that. That’s where you being made in the image of God begins, but not where it ends. To be created in God’s image and after his likeness means that God has created you to reflect his goodness, his glory, and his love. It literally means that you are not just capable of reflecting God’s character, it’s what you were meant for, and if you do that the way God intends, you’ll reflect God to the world and the world will flourish.

In the entire creation account in Genesis 1, verse 26 stands out because it’s the one thing that we can never forget if we ever hope to live meaningful lives and have a society that truly flourishes. Unfortunately, it’s also the one thing we’ve laid aside as a culture, as a church, as a nation, and as individuals. We have have to reclaim verse 26 if we’re ever going to get our lives and our nation back on track to receive the blessings and protection of God, and we have to understand verse 26 in three different ways. We have to understand it’s importance to us individually, it’s meaning to others, and it’s role in society as a whole. I want us to look at all three of those.

First, what’s the importance of being made in the image of God to you as an individual, in your life?

We’ve forgotten God as a society, and we all know that when God is taken away, something else has to take its place. For the Western world in the past century or so, the thing that’s replaced God is science. Science says it has all the answers, and science tells us that we are the most complex creatures known to exist, but we’re accidents. We’re products of cosmic luck, children of blind evolution, and because of that we’re no more significant than a rock or a fish. Science can tell us how wonderful our bodies and our minds are, but it can’t tell us at all that we have value, dignity, worth, or rights. In fact, science says that we don’t really have any of those things, because we’re basically the same as anything else.

There are a lot of problems with that sort of thinking, but the biggest is this — as human beings, we need that sense of worth and value more than anything else. We have to know that we matter. But the problem with secular society is that you can be so broken by a lack of worth and value that you end up seeing a therapist, and that therapist says, “You’re important. You’re worth something. You have dignity.” But then you get out into the world and you’re told over and over again that you don’t have those things. You’re not special, because at the bottom line you’re just meat and bones. There’s no soul. There’s no difference between you and anything else.

But Genesis 1:26 says otherwise. That verse says that you are made in the image and likeness of God, and as the last act of creation, God paused and created humanity. In verse 27 we see that word “created” repeated three times. That’s a Jewish way of writing that creates the image of God literally singing as he created you. Singing.

And let me tell you this. There are too many Christians who dwell on the sins of their lives. There are too many Christians who walk around in chains because of the horrible things they’ve done. There are too many Christians who are bound for heaven but still slaves to their past. If that is you, then listen to me: I don’t want to hear about what a miserable person you were or how much of a sinner you continue to be, because trust me — everybody knows that. Everybody knows it because they’re the exact same way. I want to hear instead that you’re a forgiven child of the living Christ who bled and died for those sins so you could be raised up with him, that you carry an eternal worth that is beyond price because you possess the image and likeness of the God of all creation, and I want to hear you say that because God does. Not. Make. Junk. God does not make junk, and that includes you. You bear the likeness of your heavenly father, so hold your head up high.

But now second, what’s the importance of this when it comes to other people besides you. I’m going to quote you a verse that too many Christians are skipping right past nowadays, and that is James 3:9. Here’s what James writes about the tongue:

“With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.”

In other words, when you yell and cuss and tear down other people, you are doing those same things to God himself. Just as that image and likeness of God is in you, it’s also in every person you meet. Doesn’t matter who they are, what they look like, what they believe, or how they live. You have never met and ordinary person. Every person in this world is an eternal being who one day will either wear the new body of someone we would be tempted to worship in this world, or the body of someone that we would meet only in our worst nightmares. Everything in this world will pass away, every rock and every civilization, but the people you meet won’t because they have a glory given to them by God. The word “glory” means significance. They have a significance and a worth that is beyond measure, and the weight of every person’s significance to God is a weight that we should carry with us into every conversation and every encounter. Every person you meet should be treated with sacredness and kindness, not just because God commands it, but because God made them as images of himself. You are not getting angry at a mortal person. You are not dismissing a mortal person. You are not treating a mortal person with contempt and hate, you are treating God himself in them that way. And there is where we come to verse 27, and American society in the year 2023.

Verse 27 says that man was created for woman and woman for man. Point blank, black and white, period, end of story.

But the trueness of our faith isn’t shown in how we treat people who are just like us. Just about everyone is kind to those who believe and live as they do. No. The trueness of our faith is shown in how we treat people who believe and live differently than us, people who stand on the other side of the issues we argue over. And for us living in this age, homosexuality has become the biggest issue there is.

With last month being Pride Month, I was asked by a lot of people whether homosexuality is a sin. The Bible clearly says it is. People have tried to do some pretty nifty gymnastics with language to get scripture to say otherwise, but it just doesn’t work. Homosexuals are sinners. No doubt about it. And so to them I say, “Welcome to the club.”

So then question is, Can homosexuals go to heaven? Well, can thieves go to heaven? Can greedy people, or foolish people, or mean people, or envious people? Because in Romans 1, Paul lists those sins right along with homosexuality as ones that will keep us out of the kingdom of God. Being gay isn’t a worse sin than any other, it’s just the one that’s argued over most today. So can sinners go to heaven? Well, we all better hope so. Of course they can, but only one way — only through Christ. Only through your faith in him, and his work in you. Heaven isn’t about how good we behave, heaven is about new birth. Heaven depends not on what we’ve done, but on how we respond to Jesus’s sacrifice on our behalf, because our true identity is in him.

The Bible says there’s only one unforgivable sin. Mark 3:28–29: Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” The only sin God can’t forgive is the sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. It’s the sin of denying God and denying Christ’s resurrection as the only way to him.

So when it comes to this great issue of homosexuality, God looks at us and says, “Love them, because I do. Treat them with respect, because they’re made in my image just like you are.”

The problem is that love and respect isn’t good enough anymore, because now we’re being told we have to celebrate that particular sin. We have to call it a good thing, we have to say that a person’s worth is determined by their sexuality, and as Christians we can’t do that. We just can’t, because the Bible says it’s sin. We don’t celebrate the sins in others, and we don’t call those sins good. We can love and respect gay people because they’re made in God’s image, but we can’t say they’re living life in a way that God approves. And by the way, that’s true for all of us. Look through that long list of sins Paul writes about in Romans 1, you’ll see yourself in there. Paul saw himself in there. That’s exactly why he could never stop talking about the grace of God.

How we treat others and how we see the image of God in them matters more than ever. It closes the distance between us, and that takes us to our last point. The principle that every human being has rights that cannot be taken away isn’t an American one. That’s not an idea that our founders sat down and dreamed up. Instead it’s an idea that is uniquely Christian, and it comes straight from the Bible. We are all made in God’s image, and that carries a weight of glory that gives every person worth, dignity, respect, and rights. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. based his entire movement on that principle.

But what happens to a society that was founded on the image of God, like ours was, but then turns away from God? That’s what we’re finding out now. Because the scientists and politicians and thinkers who guide our society say that we’re not special, we just evolved differently. But if we’re not special, then where do our human rights come from? What are they based on if they’re not based not God? What makes us worthy of having rights at all?

That’s been a huge problem for secular people, and in the last 50 years or so, they’ve come up with a solution. Human rights, they say, is based on the idea of abilities. Let me explain what they mean by that.

Human beings deserve rights because they have the ability to reason and think. They have the ability to make moral choices. They have the ability to know right from wrong. Because people have these abilities, they have rights that are worth protecting.

Now first, notice that all of these abilities are given in the Bible as proof that we’re made in the image of God. The only one of those that secular people leave out is the existence of the soul. But second, there’s a huge problem with this way of thinking, because this is exactly why, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion is legal. Because if human beings have rights not because they’re made in the image of God but because they have abilities, babies in the womb don’t have the ability to reason and think. They can’t make moral choices. They don’t know right from wrong. If babies in the womb don’t have any of those abilities, then they don’t have rights worthy of protecting.

But now wait a minute — if that’s true, then infants don’t have those abilities either, do they? Many elderly people don’t too, because they lose those abilities as they age. The mentally handicapped don’t have those abilities. You see the problem? If you think abortion is okay because babies in the womb don’t have rights, then you have to believe that infants and the old and the mentally handicapped don’t have rights either. That’s exactly why if you believe in the image of God, you absolutely cannot approve of abortion unless it’s to save the mother’s life.

The beginning of the Christian church happened in a society that was a lot like ours. All sorts of evil things were permitted by law. Slavery, abortion, the killing of infants, all were legal. The poor and the elderly, especially the sick elderly, were just allowed to die. But the Christians stood up against all of that because of one reason alone — every human being is made in God’s image and worthy of protecting.

And so Christians became champions of women, and the poor, and the old, and the sick, and after centuries the entire Western world came to base their laws on the image of God, because here’s what people discovered — if you base human worth on that, then the circle of protection people have widens to include everyone. But if you don’t base human worth on God’s image in them, that circle keeps getting smaller and smaller until only a few people’s rights are protected, and that’s where we’re heading today.

Poverty, injustice, people screaming at each other, hating each other, violence, terrorism, wars. Everywhere we look, the image of God is being trampled. Why is that? Here’s why: We don’t honor the image of God in others because that image is broken in ourselves. That poor little girl I told you to be praying about before our service, she was made in the image of God. The two people charged with her murder didn’t honor that. Do you know why? Because those two people were made in God’s image too, and they didn’t honor that first.

You were made to be a mirror. What do mirrors do? They reflect, don’t they? If you are made in the image of God, who should you be reflecting? God. If you’re not doing that, you have to reflect something else. You have to get your significance from somewhere outside of yourself, because that’s how you were made. The biggest lie we’re told is the one that says the only thing that matters is what you think of yourself, because you’ll never find significance there.

The only way you will ever know your true worth and glory is if you use the mirror inside you to reflect Christ. And the only way you can do that is if you face him every day, him alone, and then show that glory reflected through you to the world. If you reflect god, you’re going to spread life wherever you go. If you make anything in your life worth more than God, you’re going to reflect that and bring death wherever you go.

Charles Stanley preached nine words that should guide your every day: Look your best, be your best, do your best.

Look your best. How many people do you meet in public every day look like they just rolled out of bed? I go to see my kids at college, half the students walking around campus are wearing sweatpants and pajamas. I want to say to them, “Don’t you know you’re made in the image of God? Take some pride in yourself and put on some real clothes.” You carry the image of God inside you. That means every day, you should present your best image to the world.

Be your best. Pray that the Holy Spirit will help you notice the sins in your life, and then pray that He’ll help you overcome them. Be polite. Be kind. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Use gentle words.

Do your best. Get out there every day and no matter how small the task is that you’re doing, do the best job you can for God’s glory. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” That’s why you were created — to give God glory. And that guarantees your own glory and significance, because it means that you are important to God himself.

If we would think about our likeness to God more often and then reflect that likeness onto everyone we meet, this country and this world would be transformed. That’s up to us. That’s your job. Think about who you are, not who you were. Think about his grace more than you think about your sins. Think about the fact that when the Lord of the universe, the all-powerful, all-holy, all-knowing God of all wanted to create something that was in his image, he made you. And then live like you believe it.

Let’s pray:

Father truly each of us are beautifully and wonderfully made. Made to carry your image inside of us. Made to reflect your goodness and love and holiness. But so often, Father, we fail to live up to that likeness of you, content to go our own way and therefore to make ourselves less, both in our sight and in yours. We pray that your Spirit increases in us each day, and that our own selves with our own selfish wants and opinions grows less and less, until all others see when they look at us is your face. For it’s in Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.